Schroedinger's Cat
by Nyah
Summary: Derek used to cut the lawn. Could be a sequel of sorts to "Prayers" though reading that is not necessary. M: for adult themes.


**Disclaimer:** No affiliation, no claims, no money changing hands.

**Rating**: M

**Warning:** Adult themes

**Note**: feel free to comment. Make me a better writer.

Schroedinger's Cat

"Sarah!" Derek shouted upon hearing the buzzing of a lawn motor sounding from the backyard. He hopped out of the truck and started rounding the house. "Sarah!" She probably wouldn't hear him over the mower but the woman's insanity had reached levels that superceded even _his _rational thought.

"Hey, Derek!" The neighbor, Kasey, called from her porch like she was almost-, but not quite- sure that that was his name. "I sent the boys who cut my lawn over," She said nodding towards the sound of the mower. "Just wanted to thank Sarah, you know, for all the help with the baby. And since she hurt her leg right…?"

"Yeah, yeah," Derek said, retrieving one of many cover stories they needed in order to live in suburbia. "She, uh, she was out running and she tripped, tore some muscle, twisted her knee up pretty good." The bullet in her thigh hadn't helped the fictional sports injury heal any faster.

"Ouch," Kasey grimaced. "I figured she probably shouldn't be out doing yard work…." Kasey's look and tone ganged up on him to say, "And your yard is starting to look like crap and you, like my dead-beat boyfriend, have neglected to man up and take care of your family," while her neighborly smile stayed warmly in place. Derek thought, not for the first time, that the machines tended to choose male forms because they were not advanced enough yet to exhibit the baffling complexities of female communication.

"Yeah, she should stay off it." He jerked his thumb vaguely in the direction from which he'd come as if to say, "That's why I was shouting." What he did say was, "Thanks."

"No problem," Kasey smiled at the slight praise. "Danny, he's the older one, was the first kid I ever babysat. He started this little lawn care business. He's trying to buy a car, you know? Can you believe it? I mean, I've known him since he was a baby." Kasey bounced the infant in her arms to illustrate her point.

"Yeah, they uh, they grow up fast," Derek said with a tight smile, hoping he'd filled his quota of neighborly prattle for the day. "Thanks again."

He was probably not as thoroughly inside the house as he should have been before he started shouting again. Sarah never answered his shouts. The woman had an unwillingess to be found that had passed cautious and become a dangerously involuntary habit.

He found her on the back porch, standing against the railing and holding twin glasses of iced tea. She didn't look up when the screen door slammed behind her or when he stood beside her as she looked out into the yard at the pair of boys cutting the grass and weeding the flowerbeds. He plucked a glass of tea from her hand. "That's for them," she said mildly, distractedly.

Derek looked at the glass of tea with its marble-sized bits of ice that had once been cubes and the condensation that was already running down the glass and over his hand. He took a sip. It was instant tea and had probably been too strong before the ice melted. "What, they don't like tea?" He knew she hadn't actually offered the boys tea, he just didn't know why. He'd discovered quickly that why was always at issue with Sarah Connor. Derek was more of a 'how' man.

Sarah gave him a puzzling look, like he'd accidentally made a joke. Funny Derek.

"Kasey sent them over," Sarah said, unnecessarily answering a question he hadn't asked. "Dan Gaghliardi," Sarah said, nodding at the kid pushing the mower doggedly across the yard. "Nice kid."

"Tryin' to buy a car," Derek said, staring at Sarah, wondering how long her contemplation of yard work would last.

When Sarah finally turned toward him her eyes were brimming with tears and with the determination not to let them fall. "You didn't tell me you lived around here."

"What?"

"Before Judgment Day," Sarah clarified. "You lived near here."

"Not really," he said honestly because she'd caught him off guard. He didn't include that it had been the old house he'd lived near, that that neighborhood had brought with it enough disorienting nostalgia that being shot and under house arrest was almost a blessing.

Sarah was looking at him like she was waiting for him to ask something or figure something out. As far as he was concerned, if she had something to say then she could say it. But with Sarah he'd learned not to hold his breath. "There's more tea in the fridge," Sarah said, her way of telling him to refill the glass he'd drunk.

Moments later she took the full glass from his hand without a word and crossed the yard to where Dan pushed the mower. The boy stopped the mower and accepted Sarah's offering with a grin. They exchanged words Derek couldn't hear, then Dan waved and shouted, "Derek! C'mere! Iced Tea!" Before Derek had much time to be confused, the second boy appeared from behind the shed, wrestling with a bag of weeds. Derek understood Sarah's accusations.

"You don't seem surprised," Sarah said when she returned to the porch. Anger was snapping in her eyes, taking the place of the tears that had unmade themselves.

What she had to be angry about Derek couldn't say. His thirteen-year-old self wasn't a threat to them. "My cousin –_Danny_- used to cut lawns," to buy a car, he thought. "I helped him out a couple of summers. I forgot about it." He'd thought for so long that he remembered the world before the bombs perfectly. It was alive behind his eyelids when he slept, alive, and exquisite, and burning. He'd slowly come to realized as he ate hot dogs, passed lemonade stands, and watched leaves turn that'd he'd probably forgotten more than a little kid like Kyle had ever known.

"You forgot?" Sarah wore the expression that she did so often with John. Across her face, her rational mind battled with the instinct that sprung up to protect her in her own personal battle against Armageddon.

But this time rationality won and Sarah sighed seeming to accept that as strange as the present situation was, it wasn't threatening. "They'll be back two more times," Derek offered.

"Why?"

He thought about saying, "To cut the grass," since it was the obnoxiously literal answer to her annoying ambiguous question. "I don't know Sarah. You're always talking about there being no fate. Go out there and tell them not to come back again."

Two Sundays later Sarah sat with her legs dangling off the porch, watching a young version of Derek Reese pull weeds from her flower-less flowerbeds. She had a lapful of files but knew she wasn't making a convincing show of occupation.

"Where's John?" Derek asked from behind her, announcing his presence with a crash of the screen door.

"Out with Riley," Sarah said. "And Cameron," was implied.

Derek sat down next to and set an uncapped beer, presumably for her, in her line of sight. "Your iced tea sucks," he said. He was close enough that she could smell bits of his life rolling off him, laundry detergent, gun oil, and that ever present something that relentlessly stirred memories of his brother like the scent of the house they'd grown up in had lingered on their skin or the dust of the war tunnels had been ground beneath it.

"It's instant."

"I know. I'm impressed too."

That sat for a long time, not talking, not arguing, just sitting. Sarah laughed to herself. She thought she could count on one hand the minutes in the past month when she'd been in the same room with Derek and there had not been an air of crisis. But give them a glimpse of the past and both of them could idle away hours.

"Your father dropped _him_ off an hour ago. You know, you look just like him, your father." The striking resemblance of the elder Reese to his oldest son had surprised Sarah to the point of confusion and her mind tried to bend around a third version of Derek. She watched the pair for a moment from the front door, finally blinking the older man's sharp features into focus and seeing the differences between the two. "Kyle didn't look like him though. Not much." She hated the way her voice almost rose in a question, betraying the doubts she had about her memory.

"Yeah," Derek agreed. "Kyle looked more like our mother. It's funny just how much kids can look like their parents."

Derek was looking right at her in that odd way that he had, like he knew too much and nothing at all at the same time. She bit her bottom lip. She'd known where this conversation was headed when she started it but she wasn't sure why she was pushing when they'd danced around the issue so neatly for so long. "John looks just like his father."

"That he does," Derek said without hesitation.

Sarah was almost ready to explain, almost ready to tell him so it took her an extra beat to catch up. "How did you…?"

"The reason you said. And I knew his father pretty well." Derek was looking at her in a way that was familiar. She thought of all the times she'd felt Kyle there, unmentioned, between them and realized that she hadn't been the only one.

"John…."

"John knows." There was harshness in his voice. The secret had been theirs until now, she thought, the Reese boys. The comfort of family wasn't meant for her. "I took him to the park once. We used to go there to play baseball, me and Kyle."

"His birthday," Sarah said, remembering the redness in her son's eyes. "Before Sarkissian."

Derek nodded.

"I brought the boys some of that _tea_ earlier," Sarah said. "You were a polite little kid, called me 'ma'am.'" She smiled, now that she knew he knew. "Not like John at that age."

It was Derek's turn to laugh. "My father was from the south," he explained. "And my mother was dead- not blowing up factories."

They drank their beer and both thought, separately, about mothers dying before the bombs fell. "I remember this," Derek said.

"Remember what?"

"This," Derek said. "I remember pulling weeds while these two people just kind of stared at me. I remember wondering what the hell they were thinking, just starin' at me like that."

Sarah nodded but hesitated. Once she'd loved gossip, loved girl-talk, loved real conversation. Now her jaw locked down tight over anything but the most sparse and essential information. "I've been praying," she said.

Derek raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

"For him," she clarified, nodding at the boy who was sweating away under the summer sun. "That he doesn't have to grow up to be you." Some part of her shrank back from the harshness of her own words but the rest of her knew he'd understand what she meant.

Derek laughed and pointed with the rim of his beer at the kid in the yard. "You know what I was thinking? I was thinking how I'd like to be that guy. I remember him sitting on his porch, holding this beautiful woman's hand. My mom had just died, you know, and I kind of hated, I dunno, _families_. Normal ones." He had to stop because, as serious as he was right then, neither of them could keep a straight face at the idea of the Connors as a normal family. "But I thought it might be alright, being that guy up there."

That was something she liked about Derek Reese, she had to admit. There was no bullshit with him. He wasn't calling "beautiful" as a sly compliment. He wasn't trying to take advantage of the fact that she'd been on the verge of tears since they'd spoken of Kyle. He was just telling her what he remembered.

She took his hand then, for accuracy's sake. "No fate but what we make," she said when he looked at her for an explanation. She wondered when she'd made this fate. Was it twenty years ago, in his time, when the little boy watched the woman lean over and kiss the man? Was it now when she surprised herself by pressing her lips to his so fiercely that she could feel the press of his teeth through his skin?

When they parted, Derek stood and pulled her up by the hand with the same feeling of the inevitable. Sarah saw the boy in yard look away out of the corner of his eye. She wondered if this was something else Derek remembered. Did he remember that the man's hands were already inside the woman's shirt before the back door had a chance to close?

For an instant, Sarah waxed philosophical, wondering if fate was only made when someone was there to observe it. But then his hands were everywhere but where she wanted them to be and there was too much cotton between them and she turned her mind to more important things.

On more than one occasion she'd cut his clothes off with scissors or a razor blade to get at a wound underneath. She'd seen him naked enough times now to know his tattoos, to know the muscles made long and lean by hard use. But that was a kind of hypothetical nakedness, there hadn't been a chance then that he'd touch her, that he'd be inside her.

With the small of her back against the counter top and his hands at her hips she pressed a hand against his chest, stopping him before he could lift her up. She pushed him back so she could get a look at him. It was a mistake, she knew immediately. She could see too much of Kyle in the lovely devastation of scars and ink on his chest. She could feel him in the callused palms and smell him on every inch of Derek's skin.

She looked up to tell him of her mistake, to alter reality from what the boy thought was happening behind the closed door. But then she met his eyes, so very, very unlike Kyle's, and nodded once. He lifted her to the counter top by the hips. He didn't pause like Charley might have, trying to understand her hesitation. When he pulled her legs around his waste and pushed inside her he wasn't reverent like Kyle but he wasn't vicious like so many of the men she'd known since.

It was an itch ignored by people who were used to scratching. See looked him in the eye, even as her back arched and his lips parted on their own accord. It was his name there on the tip of her tongue, though she bit it back and buried it under moans and curses. Later he'd think of what he owed Jesse and she'd think of what she'd tell John but for now she wonders why they waited so long while he wonders how.

An hour later, wearing fresh clothes, Sarah handed Dan some cash and told him she'd take care of the yard work from now on. Derek kicked at a clump of grass, his features set in an attitude of glumness that Sarah didn't think his counterpart was capable of anymore.

She looked at the boy and thought of the brother that must be waiting for him at home. If the bombs fell and the word burned the boys would be changed in the fire, coming out so different from one another and from who they used to be. In a lot of ways, Armageddon was a local phenomenon, worlds ending in every child.

But maybe not this child. Maybe this time they'd make a better world and he'd get to live in it.


End file.
